Crytek has finally released the long awaited update for its Crysis 2 game that brings aditional eye-candy to those that are running high-end PCs with DirectX 11 capable graphics cards.

The new update includes tessellation and displacament mapping, high quality HDR motion blur, more realistic shadows, improved depth of field with sprite based Bokeh, parallax occlusion mapping, particles motion blur, shadows and art updates, and improvements in water rendering thanks to the mentioned tessellation and displacemnt mapping.

The new update also brings some improvements in DirectX 9 including realtime local reflections, contact shadows and improved tone mapping. In addition to those that are available via DirectX 11 upgrade pack, Crytek also released the Crysis 2 high-res texture pack that brings highly-detailed textures. Of course, in order to run such an update, you'll need a GPU that has at least 768MB of video memory, or 768MB per GPU in multi-GPU configuration, as well as Windows 7 or Vista 64-bit OS.

Talk of a DirectX 11 patch for Crysis 2 on the PC has been something that has been rumored for a long time. Many of our sources have told us that we could expect full DX11 support that would be delivered in a patch for the PC version after release. (Not to pour gasoline on a fire, but we seem to recall Nvidia having this on a list of titles to have DX11 support back in January.)

The rumors appear to be false, or at least nothing more than wishing for DX11 support. Apparently, in the MyCrysis forums one of the forum moderators was quick to address the situation. Cry-Tom is quoted as saying, “No patch was ever confirmed.” Later on in his posting he reminds players that, “When there are any big announcements regarding Crysis 2 they will be posted on MyCrysis.com, and if you don’t see it on MyCrysis.com then it isn’t genuine.”

While Cry-Tom stopped short of saying that it would never happen, he apparently is suggesting that Crytek is focused on other things at the moment; and if DX11 support is added in a patch somewhere down the line, they are not ready to announce it or to talk about it at this time. No real surprise that they don’t want to talk about it if it isn’t announced.

Our sources tell us that they are now unsure as to Crytek’s plans on adding DX11 support. Because of the Nvidia posting, it was thought that this was a ‘given,’ but now we are not so sure. From the talk around the water cooler we are hearing, it seems that for the time being we would not count on it. Of course, who knows what the future holds?

We received confirmation that future Chief River notebook platform can support both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors. This means that notebooks will be selling with both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors at the same time.

As you can imagine, Sandy Bridge platform will be really affordable in early 2012, and it will drop Ion price significantly, whereas Ivy Bridge 22nm CPU with DirectX 11 will take over the performance lead.

Intel also promises three display support, DirectX 11, significantly faster graphics, USB 3.0, Display Port and HDMI 1.4. And of course, let's not forget the RST caching feature - a new technology that can make your hard drives much faster.

Notebooks based on Chief River platform are scheduled for 1H 2012 launch, as long as Intel doesn't mess with its plans and decides to rush things.

Not only does Ivy Bridge pack graphics that can cope with DirectX 11 specification it also has more executing units or EUs. Nvidia calls them Shaders or graphics processors while Intel still prefers the acronym EU.

Back in October, our sources were convinced that Intel doubled the EU number from 12 to 24 but according to the latest communication between Intel and its partners the number sunk to 16. This again means that Intel’s next generation 22nm CPU with graphics gets substantially faster as the clock can go further up and that just based on more EUs, you can expect at least 25 percent better scores compared to Sandy Bridge.

DirectX 11 support will definitely be a powerful marketing tool, but many know that gaming on Intel is not something that you can recommend to many. However it will let you play some basic games at acceptable eye candy rates. Intel claims it will be enough for mainstream gaming on a broad range of titles and native DirectX 11 support.

Intel plans further enhancements in multimedia parts of graphics in order to make decoding and encoding of DVD and Blu-ray content faster, as the company expects that many will want to burn or share this HD content.

Acer and sister brand eMachines have unveiled two new products powered by new, high-speed AMD dual-core processors and chipsets.

First up is the latest Acer Aspire One 522 netbook which is built from one of the new Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) from AMD. In this case it is the Dual-Core C-50 processor from AMD’s Fusion Family of APUs coupled with the AMD A50M Fusion Controller Hub. It comes with 2GB DDR3 which makes it fairly grunty for a netbook.

It comes with an HDMI port, a 250GB SATA hard drive, Acer InviLink Nplify 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi connectivity, as well as Acer’s CrystalEye Web camera. It is claimed the Aspire One 522 can manage five hours on a full charge with its lithium-ion battery.

Also released was the eMD644 laptop from eMachines. It has an AMD Dual-Core E-350 processor and the AMD A50M Fusion Controller Hub chipset.

Its graphics are handed by the AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics card and which supports a slew of graphics technologies such as Unified Video Decoder 3 (UVD3), OpenCL 1.1, OpenGL 3.1, Open EXR High Dynamic-Range (HDR) technology, ShaderModel 5.0 and Microsoft DirectX 11, among others.